About a week ago I wrote about TasteWP and how you can get a WordPress site for free that will last just a short time before it extinguishes automatically. It will last for 48 hours, or if you sign in, then for seven days.
For anyone who is on WordPress.com and wonders what it is like in the back end of a self-hosted site, this is an easy way to do it.
What you get is a playground to experiment without worrying that you are messing up anything important.
For example, you can add plugins from the repository at WordPress.org. That is pretty neat because it gives you a way to do things that cannot be done on WP.com unless you are on the Business plan.
For example, you could set up a WooCommerce e-commerce store, add a couple of test products and just find your way around WooCommerce.
And when the site extinguishes – let it go, and build another. And all for free.
Or, maybe you have seen a WordPress theme in the repository at WordPress.org and would like to see it’s plus and minus points. It’s not always easy to know all the features of a theme until you have uploaded, activated, and played with it.
Of course I am sure that the people at TasteWP hope that some users will decide to use their hosting. But that’s for further down the road.
Photograph Works 
Good marketing of TasteWP to offer freebie WordPress sites!
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Yes, it’s a tried and tested business model, isn’t it – give a little something for free and if people see the benefit, maybe they will stick around with the company and sign up for web hosting. That’s the principle, and the cost to the company is very low – just allow people to spin up a site on a sub-domain – and then destroy the site automatically after a couple of days. Actually, there is another company that does that – and they used to allow the sub-domain to remain active forever. It is the same business model – hoping that people would convert it to regular web hosting with the company with their own domain name. After that model had been running for a while they changed it so that the sub-domains only remained active for 30 days before auto-destruction. I think it was costing them too much money to keep the servers running with all these perpetual sub-domain sites.
And that comes back to WordPress.com and how it keeps going. The free sites are the backbone of the offering, but with incentives to choose a paid plan of some kind – incentives such as having one’s own domain name, being able to add a Paypal button and sell things, more space to upload images, and other goodies.
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WPcom had a similar service for a while where you could set up a jetpack-connected WP install for a week, but they seem to have taken it down for public use. Shame that because it was a good way to test things out in a WPcom familiar environment. Thanks again for posting about TasteWP. Will certainly check it out.
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